The two men in the back of the group, which was just passing him stopped, and turned to look down at Alec’s position, easily separating to take different angles of observation, and placing their hands on their sword hilts. Their reactions were not startling in the way that an engaged Ajax or Warrior ingenaire would have been, but they nonetheless showed training and ability.
The rest of the company halted after several more steps. “What is it Mal?” a voice asked quietly.
“We heard a noise,” the man who was nearest to Alec, less than a dozen yards away, answered. “It feels like there’s someone out here, or they’ve been here.” The other attentive guard crept further to Alec’s left, so that they had ninety degrees in the angle they drew on his position. Even invisible, Alec felt vulnerable; he gently fumbled at his belt, trying to prepare to unleash his sword without making a sound.
“Do you see anything?” the man from the front group asked.
“No,” replied Mal, the man closest to Alec. “But I feel something.”
“We’ll ask the guard post up the road if anyone came by,” the leader replied. “We’re under orders to put this message in the post, so let’s keep moving.”
The two guards stood still for a moment more, then stepped back, and reluctantly joined their comrades on the road. Alec remained in the woods without moving for several more minutes, until he finally had to scratch his nose. Tentatively he crept up to the edge of the road and peered cautiously in both directions. No one appeared in sight, and with a sigh of relief Alec stepped up onto the crushed stone surface of the road. There was a flash as the sun rose over the mountains to the east and a ray of early red sunlight glinted off a metal surface far down the road. It was an indication that one of the travelers had stayed behind and kept an eye on the spot of the suspicious sound.
With a deep breath, Alec began to jog up the road, longing for the second he would turn a curve and no longer be in sight, if he had been visible. Even as an invisible man he felt exposed by the heightened sense of the Ajacii. He didn’t know how close he was to the village of the Ajacii, but he was nervous already, and knew he would be until he had Caitlen and Bethany someplace safe.
Alec jogged carefully, raising his feet high with every step to avoid raising dust clouds by scuffing his feet, walking all day long. He ate as he walked, though he ate very little. He had no appetite. He constantly looked above him, trying to find hidden guard posts to be wary of, and keeping an eye open for places he might have to hide with his companions on the way back out. By the end of the day he had climbed several hundred feet higher into the mountains, though not nearly as high as the road to Black Crag had taken him.
He spent the night in a shallow cave, and started the third day of his journey as soon as sunlight appeared over the eastern mountains. At noon the road crested a ridge, and began a precipitous descent. For the next three hours he set his feet and legs at angles to slow his pace as he invisibly descended into a valley. He had caught sight of a flat river valley bottom that cut a wide canyon in the mountains, and a bridge that spanned the river in a village of many buildings.
One of those buildings, he suspected, held his wife and his friend. Even as he descended, Alec tried to evaluate the escape route they would have to take; for now he knew of only this single tortuous path available to leave the village below. Once they got out of the village they would have to climb up the long, grueling mountainside road he was descending now. It would be difficult to climb rapidly, especially for two sets of legs that had probably had little exercise over several days of captivity. The Ajacii would know that they were climbing the road; there was no other exit evident from the village.
They would have to try to make their escape up the mountainside by night, for any traveler on this path was eminently visible to the eyes of the entire village below. Alec’s bubble of invisibility would be limited and unreliable; he had too little practice to be able to make it spread widely and consistently. The three of them would have to huddle close together, and hope that the combination of night time and invisibility would be enough to give them a wide lead in the race out of Valer. And if the rest of his plan worked, the escape would be possible.
At the bottom of the trail there were a half dozen houses built along the hill the road descended, houses painted in bright pastel colors that seemed cheerful, incongruous with the expectations Alec had for what would exist here; the Ajacii were a race he had expected to be colorless and without pleasure in such simple things as bright paints. The rest of the village was similar housing, some large buildings that seemed suited for public use or retail activity, and a public square in which a body hung limply from a gibbet.
The sun still reached down into the valley bottom as Alec arrived in the village proper, and walked carefully and invisibly among the other people who strolled or walked briskly about their business. He headed to the public buildings, so that he could study them from the outside. He found guards posted at the doors, something he might have expected in a normal city, but that he found pointless in this village. What would be the use of trying to guard a building in a village full of Ajacii, he wondered. Even an Ajax guard would be unable to stop a mob of determined Ajacii citizens.
He found a spot against the wall of the front of the building, beneath a window, from which he could observe and listen to all that was happening around him before sunset. He was convinced that Caitlen and Bethany could only be in this village, and he needed to find where they were held; then he would need time to study the prison facilities and operations to find the best way to carry out his rescue.
The window he was beneath was an office he realized, when he overheard three men inside talking, discussing their alliance with the sorcerers.
“They failed us,” one voice said in a matter-of-fact tone, evidently repeating something that seemed clear to him. “We expected their monsters, the demons, to fight the battles that would defeat the princess’s armies, and let us be the heroes when we brought them under control. Instead, they’ve all been killed, even the secret one you sent to the palace to assassinate the Princess.”
“You didn’t foresee the impact of this meddling foreigner, did you?” another voice snapped. “If you did, you didn’t tell anyone. We’ve had to make contingencies for contingencies after our contingency plans blew up! That son-of-the-dark-one is still alive and still in the palace. You heard me say he killed Stocker didn’t you? What are we going to do next?”
“There are still the Sleagh Maith. Their emissary arrived today. We can hope that they are ready to rouse themselves from their long slumber and join our plan,” the first voice replied.
“We still have the princess. She’s still held here, surrounded by a village of Ajacii. We can find a way to win control of the empire. We may need to send a full squad of our best warriors to Vincennes to find him and kill this Alec, but we can do it,” a third voice, a smooth, confident voice spoke. “Abelard started this mess; if he would have married the girl immediately in the first place instead of playing with Isial we would have taken control a long time ago.”
“Maybe the foreigner is going to leave again soon,” the second voice said. “He seems to run out on her every so often. If we wait, we can swoop in and make her obey us the next time he leaves.”
Alec felt his anger starting to rise, then heard the third voice reply. “He doesn’t have that power to disappear any longer. We can corner him and kill him.”
“You said the last demon would do that,” the first man’s voice replied disparagingly.
“Don’t,” the third man’s voice lost its smoothness as he spoke through gritted teeth. “Don’t think,” the man said after a pause, as he seemed to collect himself, “that I don’t know that this jumped up foreigner has won every one of the key battles so far. He freed the princess when we had Abelard designated to rescue her, he set her free again and again, he went to the north and won at Krimshelm, he went south and won against the demons. He has gotten the girl pregnant
and given her an heir, which we’ll have to deal with.”
Alec choked on his anger as he listened to the cold-hearted plotting.
“If the Sleagh Maith stick to the plan to join us now, we will have their unique abilities to use, and we can send an ambassador south to find the other coven of sorcerers to join us,” the voice continued.
“We can’t find the Lokasennii, although we know they still are out there. Perhaps we’ll be able to locate them and deal with them at an appropriate time,” another voice chimed in.
“Do you think we could ask the foreigner to join us?” he asked after a pause, his voice betraying his expectations of refusal, as Alec shook his head in astonishment at the futility of such a thought.
“You have to be drunk!” one voice replied
“Maybe he would have in the beginning, but not now,” the other answered. “If we had known what he was, all of this could have been carried out so much more effectively. That is water past the dam; what do we do now?”
“Here is what we can do…”
Suddenly there was a noise from above him and he looked up to see a pail of water pouring down from a bucket held out of the second story window. The cold water drenched him and he involuntarily shouted in dismay. He slapped his hand over his mouth, and looked around to see what the reaction was.
The guard at the building door was looking directly at him, and another guard’s head stuck out the doorway to look towards him as well. “It came from right there,” the guard said to his associate.
“But there’s no one there,” the second guard objected.
“No, but look at the ground,” the first guard said, and then stopped speaking further as a sly look came over his face.
Alec looked down and saw that the bucketful of water had created a large wet puddle on the pavement, except directly below him, where an inexplicable dry spot was in the center of the puddle. Alec looked up at the window and saw three men looking down directly at him, also investigating the shout he had given. He stepped quickly aside several steps, and as he did so the guard at the door snatch up a bow, strung an arrow, and with the speed and ability of an evident Ajax, fired an arrow at the spot Alec had just vacated.
The head of the arrow flew through the air and struck the window sill behind Alec’s former location, making the men inside the room look up at the guard, startled by the shot. They disappeared back inside the room, and in half a minute were outside, standing with the guard, talking in low tones.
“See the dry spot,” the guard was saying. “That’s what I shot at.” He stepped down to ground level and walked across to the puddle. “And look at this water that splashed clear out here. This doesn’t make sense, unless it dripped off something.” Alec moved further away, and cursed the housekeeper who had dropped the water on him that raised the suspicions.
“Well, there isn’t anything to see here, so let’s just maintain security and carry on,” one man said. Alec recognized his voice as that of the third man who had spoken in the room, the one who seemed to be a leader. “Are our guests still detained?”
The guard looked across the street for a second, then glanced back to the speaker. “Nothing appears amiss. Jankers, go check on the guests,” he directed his fellow guard, and gave him a push to propel him across the road.
Jankers crossed the road, and Alec tried to cross the road as well, hoping that he wasn’t leaving a dripping trail of evidence of his movements. He looked down and saw only occasional drops, nothing that would seem to show his movement, and he crowded into the building behind Jankers as the man walked past the guards at its door to enter the front hall.
The building appeared to be an office building, not a prison. There was no sound, no stench, on extraordinary security, and no appearance of anything but a typical building where work mostly occurred behind desks or around chairs. Jankers proceeded to walk forward and then left, moving slowly down a set of stairs, with Alec cautiously following. The stairwell grew dark as they went downstairs, and Jankers pulled a lit torch off the wall at a landing as he opened a door and began to descend further below.
The second staircase had walls of bare stone, and a damp feel that seem much more in keeping with a dungeon. “Have you got the prisoners down here?” He asked as he stepped onto the floor.
A shadowy figure rose from a chair at the far end of a long, dark basement. “Of course I’ve got them. What are you doing bringing a bright light like that down here? Don’t you know you’ll get them all excited? Are you going to take a look at them?” the guard asked in an oily tone of co-conspirators. “Do you reckon they’re getting a little lonely? Ready to take one out, are you?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jankers said mildly. He turned and left the basement, taking the torch with him, and leaving Alec’s eyes struggling to adjust to the dark. After several seconds he began to regain his sight, and perceived that there was a spot of dim light, a candle, on the desk where the watchman was returning to his seat. Alec dropped his own invisibility, unneeded in the dark basement, and used his Spiritual power to reach out, seeking to detect who else was in the basement as well.
The watchman’s mind was a simmering mess of random, unpleasant thoughts, and there was another prisoner who seemed to be mostly insane. And then he found Bethany, morose, unhappy over being unable to fight for freedom. His mind jumped from her to Caitlen, and the princess’s mind reacted immediately to the touch of Alec’s examination.
Is it you? Are you here in this forsaken place? She called to him spirit-to-spirit.
I am here in the basement with you. I love you, he told her. I’ve come to set you and Bethany free.
I’m so glad to know you’re alive! Caitlen added in tones of exultation. They told us that a demon would kill you on the day they came and kidnapped us; I laughed and said you had killed up to three demons at once before! They didn’t say anything more after that for a long time.
I can’t believe you found us! She rustled about in her cell as she stood up and walked to the door, peering through the tiny opening to try to spot him. Both Alec and the watchman heard the sounds of her movement, so tantalizingly close.
“Get back. Sit down. Otherwise you’ll have visitors coming in to punish you,” the watchman said as he heard Caitlen’s movements.
Have they hurt you? Alec asked.
No, not so far. Bethany seems to be safe as well. I tried to send her messages to let her know that you’d be coming for us soon, because I knew you would, Caitlen told him. But she can’t project responses to me if she’s getting my messages.
We’ll leave this place tonight, in just a few hours, Alec told her. Just wait patiently, my love. I’ll send a message to Bethany.
How is Elisan? Caitlen asked.
He’s fine, Alec assured her. He misses his mother, and he’s being well-taken care of.
Bethany, I am in the basement with you and Caitlen, hiding in the shadows, Alec sent a message to her. This evening we are going to escape from here. Be patient; I’ll let you know when it is time to act.
Alec slumped to the ground to consider how he would proceed. This was to be a tricky maneuver on his part as he would need to use large bursts of his ingenaire powers rapidly, then have to sustain more energy for an extended period of time. He would need to rest and recover as soon as they reached the top of the long climb up the mountainside, he foresaw, which would mean several hours tomorrow hidden somewhere, and probably most of their travel thereafter during the night.
He could help his cause if he began his plan early, although it increased the chances that he might be caught prematurely. But after thinking about how much energy he would need to use, after having used much already today while traveling invisibly, Alec concluded it was worth the risk. He rose slowly and edged through the dark shadows at the edge of the room to get closer to the jailer, then tossed several pebbles across the room.
The jailer looked up into the dark, but his reactions were not those of an Ajax. Alec sighed in thanks
for that small favor, and tossed more pebbles.
“Is someone there?” the jailer asked, trying to pierce the shadows with his sight. He rose, and picked up his small lantern, raising it high as he began to walk towards the noises. Alec brought his fist down on the back of the man’s head, knocking him unconscious, and pitching the room into total blackness as the lantern fell and was extinguished.
Alec immediately laid hands on him, and threw a powerful blast of Healer energy into the unconscious body. He had never done anything exactly like this before; it didn’t have to be perfect, but it would have to be good enough to buy them hours or more of escape time.
Alec, what happened to the light? Caitlen asked him.
Are there any other prisoners down here? Alec asked in response.
No, no one else besides the insane man. Just the two of us, she replied.
“Caitlen, Bethany, I’ve knocked your jailer unconscious. We’ll wait until his replacement comes, then prepare to leave. Just remain calm and wait in your cell for the time being,” he spoke out loud. “And don’t try to talk to me; I need to focus on something for the moment; I’ll let you out shortly.”
Ajacii and Demons: The Ingenairii Series Page 25